Titus Andronicus dramatizes youthful dread
Patrick Stickles and his four New Jersey bandmates are 10 minutes into their tour, driving south on the Garden State Parkway. The members of Titus Andronicus just cranked “Young Turks” by Rod Stewart and are digging into a pizza from their favorite hometown pizzeria in suburban Glen Rock.
“We are probably the number one state in the union that takes the most shit, with the exception of maybe Texas,” 23-year-old Stickles says, musing on the setting for his band’s punky debut, The Airing of Grievances.
“New Jersey is always getting ragged on, but it has just turned us into the ultimate underdog,” he continues. “That just lights the fire under our ass. That’s what puts the fight in us New Jersey guys. We want to get out there and show them that Jersey can do it as good as anybody else and better. If you don’t believe us, ask Glenn Danzig or Bruce Springsteen.”
More akin to the Born to Run-era Boss than the Misfits’ campy horror shtick, Stickles’ lyrical mission is dominated by an angry itch to be someone else, somewhere else. Unlike Springsteen, who has frequently embraced pleasantries like hope, love and tenderness, Stickles paints himself an ultra-crabby nihilist. He wrote The Airing of Grievances during high school and college — its dour, bookish demeanor will hit home with liberal-arts majors who plunged headlong into such existential works as The Stranger and Nausea only to resurface militantly pissed off at a reality that seems to crowbar everyone into becoming hypocritical, bored adults.
Indeed, fear of adulthood is, in a rock context, not mere psychobabble. It’s the Blarney Stone of some of the genre’s finest records.
The album opens with “Fear and Loathing in Mahwah, NJ,” which reveals a hissy recording of a tortured-sounding Stickles on an acoustic guitar. Up from the lo-fi muck surges a gigantic group shout of fuck you! as the band rip-roars into a feral rock-and-roll machine. In the garage-orchestra vein of Neutral Milk Hotel, Titus Andronicus takes off like a ramshackle spaceship, with keyboard and harmonica melodies whirling around a stadium-sized guitar riff and an ever-pulverizing drumbeat. When the whole thing crashes, we get a reading from the play Titus Andronicus — fitting Stickles’ penchant for melodrama, it’s Shakespeare’s most bloody and absurdly brutal tragedy.
“It’s our policy that hopelessness is just as worthy of being celebrated as hopefulness,” he says. “That’s just a crucial, if not the crucial, component of the human condition, emotionally speaking. It’s a big feeling — big feeling, big noises.”
And that’s the main thing you need to know about Titus Andronicus. Stickles’ voice quivers and wails an awful lot like Conor Oberst’s, but unlike the oxygen-devoid insularity of early Bright Eyes, Stickles does well to douse his constant dread in undomesticated, celebratory rock. Though there’s no saving such comically solipsistic lines as There is not a doctor that can diagnose me/I am dying slowly from Patrick Stickles Disease, most of the time, such grotesquely maudlin sentiments are chased with catchy, anthemic tunes and intoxicating, full-band exuberance.
“Titus Andronicus,” the album’s centerpiece and the group’s best song, goes bananas, with Stickles cramming a mass of syllables into lines that shouldn’t hold them and the band generally tearing a hole in the sky. The final third of the song is dedicated to the communal screaming of Your life is over!
Stickles explains: “The death that we sing about is not the death of the body but the slow death of the human spirit. The ‘thousand deaths of a coward,’ if you will. The erosion of the goodness within us. To me, that’s more frightening than the death of the body and is probably just as hard to reverse.”
Titus Andronicus moved up the indie food chain quickly last year with a jump from Troubleman Unlimited to XL Records, thanks almost exclusively to online buzz. Stickles is grateful for the boost but seems to have a healthy humor about its virtual reality.
“Well, that popularity only exists on the Internet, and unfortunately, we don’t play a ton of concerts there,” he says. “Sometimes people write on the Internet, ‘This band fucking sucks; they’re nothing. They need to disappear forever.’ Not just about us but about every band in the world. I wish that these people could see us when we are playing to one-and-a-half paying customers in Salt Lake City on a Sunday.
“Let’s just say that objects on the Internet may be smaller than they appear.”
Appearances have been corrected in one sense. A telling early myth has slowly rotted away — namely, that Titus Andronicus is a troop of drunken buffoons. Early reviewers were so awestruck by their off-the-charts energy that they hyped up alcohol as the band’s central performance enhancer. It turns out, despite an almost pathological negativity, that Titus Andronicus is primarily powered by a lust for life.
“I think it’s just because they see dudes go wild and they think, They must be fucked up because nobody would want to do that,” Stickles says. “But who wouldn’t want to do that? Let’s go nuts — beer or no beer. Let’s live. Let’s grab life by its short hairs.”
